wanted to see and I lolled and I saw

and I didn’t see anything like

what Whitman saw

I only saw the most terrible horror

that made me a drunk for ten years and

a half-drunk for the rest of my

life:

not what they want to save or what

they want to KILL—

but that they can’t see that there isn’t anything here

that they have lied to me for so long

and expected me to be thankful for

it.

let them

wait.

[* * *]

John Logan was editor of Choice: A Magazine of Poetry and Photography. Two poems by Bukowski appeared in issue no. 5 (Summer? 1967: Dorbin C384-385).

[To John Logan]

Early June, 1965

christ, have finally gotten around to some letter of telling you I got the o.k. on the two poems and although it is now past the midnight of sobriety I type on. why do drunks always like to brag upon their deaths? it’s getting tiresome and I’m very tired of myself. [* * *]

2 people have so far told me that Rexroth has written an article for Harpers called “The New American Poets,” and so I guess I can take the ribs being 45 and tough and having only written ten years, it is substantial nevertheless that I was always outcast everywhere I went, schoolyards, whorehouses, jails, I always got the foot in the face, there was always the subnormal whom I only tolerated telling me his troubles, through the factories, through the hells, and there was always ALWAYS somebody else making it, which I didn’t mind as long as I was lifted. [* * *]

[To Al Purdy]

Early June, 1965

[* * *] yes, I fucked up in New Orleans but will always remember your letter “to hell with remorse”! and this wuz big help, baby, I am such a butcher, I guess the headshrinkers would say I am trying to hide some weakness while drunk or so forth, that I am really a homosexual or once fucked my mother, or burned a snail with a match and that I can’t face all this, really. the trouble with headshrinkers is that they have never lived—they take it from the white rats and the hand-job Freuds and then change it a little, but essentially if they saw enough men in jails and factories and wars and riding lime-burning boxcars, they’d know that what bothered us was lack of life, being hounded and poor and pissed-on and marked on down to the grave [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

early June, 1965

stinking hot, night, just took a good crap and somebody whaling the shrieking guts outa a violin on the radio, dropped 30 or less at track (I am improving) but there’s whiskey here and I have been drinking for a good 2 hours but feel very little except empty washtubs and the snoring of lambs, look, Purdy wrote, and part of it: